Break-ins, pickpocketing and reported sexual assaults dropped significantly in 2018, the newest figures show. Germany's interior minister warned, however, that the low crime rate is "not yet a sustainable success."
The crime rate in Germany has fallen for the second year in a row, according to the 2018 crime report that was published on Tuesday.
It's the lowest crime rate Germany has seen since 1992, but the Interior Ministry said the figures should be handled with caution — and did not provide any estimates on the number of unreported crimes.
The main takeaways:
The Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) detailed the number of reported criminal acts for 2018, including the following takeaways:
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'One of the safest countries in the world'
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer hailed the latest crime report, noting that less than 1 percent of the population reported being a victim of a serious crime.
"Germany is one of the safest countries in the world," Seehofer said while presenting the report at a press conference. "Of course, every crime is one too many, but this is objectively one of the lowest [crime] rates in decades.
Despite the lower crime rate, Seehofer said that "it is not yet a sustainable success" and advocated for further political action to strengthen police forces with more personnel and equipment.
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Population feels unsafe
Although the number of reported crimes is down, those statistics are not necessarily reflected in the way that people in Germany feel.
The BKA also released the results of a 2017 "victimization survey," where they asked people in 2017 about how safe they feel and whether they'd been a victim of a crime. The number of people who said they felt unsafe in their surroundings went up from 17.3 percent in 2012 to 21.4 percent in 2017, BKA president Holger Münch said.
Foreign suspect rates remain unchanged: Out of all the suspects logged by police in the report, around 34 percent of them were described as non-German — a figure that is slightly down from last year. Seehofer cautioned against politicizing statistics on foreign suspects.
rs/jm (dpa, AFP)